Columns

This is a bit of a departure from tradition – I’ve suddenly gone all PETA on yo’ asses. But as they say, animals are people too. Elephants, for example, mourn and bury their dead, and can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Given the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is no stranger to massacres at the best of times, rates of PTSD in the war-torn nation’s fast-declining elephant population must be skyrocketing.

In the DRC, elephants have become tangled up in political conflict, and these animals are paying the highest price for humans’ inability to get it together. This is not the first time this has happened, either – the Congolese mountain gorillas are also regular targets of militia groups fighting over charcoal.

As if the DRC doesn’t already have enough to worry about, what with the poverty and rapes and militias and lack of functioning government, now it’s losing its elephants at a rate last recorded in the late 1980s. Although it’s hard to talk figures with complete certainty, conservation groups say poachers are killing tens of thousands of elephants every year.

Today, ivory is the new blood diamonds (which in their day were the new ivory). But diamonds are so 2001. Move over Leonardo Di Caprio and your questionable Saffa accent, and Kanye with your Grammy-winning song: 2012 is the year of the tusk.

It’s a case of history repeating itself. In the 1980s, the slaughter of Congolese elephants was driven by Japan’s economic boom. Today, it’s driven by China’s rapidly growing bao fa hu, or middle class, who buy ivory carvings as symbols of wealth and status.

And almost everyone seems to be getting amongst the killing spree – mainly the Congolese army and various militias, but also the Ugandan army and rebel groups like the Somalian al-Shabab and the Darfurian janjaweed.

The Ugandan military appear to be using American-bought helicopters to gun down elephants from above. Naturally, Joseph Kony also gets a mention – the man the world loves to hate in 2012 is apparently selling ivory to Sudanese traders to get money for weapons. This “white gold” fetches up to US$1000 in Beijing. Despite strict laws in most African countries about poaching in general and the ivory trade in particular, 38.8 tonnes were seized in 2011.

In the DRC there are marauding bands of heavily militarised, trigger-happy park rangers who shoot first and ask questions later, and see the elephants under their protection as family members. But in this crisis, the scale of which has been compared to the Mexican drug wars, there seems to be little hope for the Congolese elephants in a country that has always been the poster child of the “resource curse”.